Agents and closing gaps with existing semantics

The WebKit team responded to WebMCP in standards-positions.

What stood out to me:

When a site's actions are hard for an agent to use, that is a gap in the page's own semantics, and the fix, in our opinion, is to close it in the platform's shared layers (HTML and ARIA), where the user, assistive technology, and agents all benefit. Describing those actions a second time as JavaScript tools would not deliver the reliability it promises: the agent still selects and interprets a tool from its natural-language name and description, which the specification itself concedes are ambiguous and unverifiable, with "no guarantee that a WebMCP tool's declared intent matches its actual behavior."

(From: WebMCP · Issue #670 · WebKit/standards-positions)

Hidde de Vries (@hdv@front-end.social) is a web enthusiast from Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He currently works on accessibility standards for the Dutch government (views his own) and is in the W3C's AB. Previously, he worked for Mozilla, W3C/WAI, national and local governments, Sanoma Learning and others as a freelancer. Hidde is a public speaker (all 91 talks). In his free time, he works on a coffee table book covering the video conferencing apps of our decade.

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